Annual Arts Survey Result Dashboard – 2022/23 Visual Arts

Starting in April 2022, with the easing of the COVID-19 pandemic, various arts and cultural venues began to re-open exhibition venues and gradually relax audience capacity. By the end of 2022, all restrictions were completely lifted, allowing Visual Arts exhibitions to be held in various arts and cultural venues. The number of Visual Arts exhibitions recorded for the 2022/23* was the highest on record.

Following a rebound from 2020/21 in the previous year, the number of Visual Arts exhibitions in Hong Kong in 2022/23 reached a new high of 1,712, representing an increase of nearly 35.8% over the previous year. The overall duration of exhibitions also hit a historic high, reaching 58,326 days. Excluding the cumulative exhibition days for permanent exhibitions, the total exhibition days amounted to 53,850 days, with an average duration of 31.8 days per exhibition, similar to the level in 2021/22 and only below the 2020/21 level (36.5 days).

When categorised by medium, excluding permanent exhibitions, except for a decrease in the number of Mixed Media & Installation, Ceramics, and Prints exhibitions, the number of exhibitions in other medium categories increased. The number of Mixed Art-forms exhibitions, Painting exhibitions, New Media Art exhibitions even reached a record high. Among them, Mixed Art-forms exhibitions continued to rise for the fifth year in a row, increasing by nearly 90% compared to the previous year, surpassing Painting exhibitions to become the largest exhibition category. Painting exhibitions and New Media Art exhibitions increased by nearly 30% and over one-third respectively, ranking second and sixth in terms of proportion. Ranking from third to fifth were Chinese Painting, Calligraphy & Seal Carving exhibitions, Photography exhibitions and Mixed Media & Installation exhibitions, maintaining the same rankings as the previous year. Chinese Painting, Calligraphy & Seal Carving exhibitions and photography exhibitions increased by over 10% and less than 5% respectively, while Mixed Media & Installation exhibitions declined by over 10%, showing the largest decrease.

The exhibitions were categorised according to the Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook, published by the Department of Fine Arts, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Data analysis in and before 2019 were based on the original records in the Yearbook. Starting from 2020, data of Visual Arts exhibitions were collected by HKADC, mainly obtained from public channels (such as online event calendars, official websites, social media pages) of organisers/groups that frequently held Visual Arts exhibitions or venues in which exhibitions were held.

Below is an interactive dashboard of statistics of physical Visual Arts exhibitions. Readers can click on the interested category/ year in one of the charts and the dashboard will be refreshed to highlight the respective category/ year.  All figures can be downloaded as well.

Note: “Unknown medium” is not included in the chart in bottom right side: “Number of Exhibitions by Medium (Excluding Permanent Exhibitions)”. Hence, the numbers of exhibitions in this table do not add up to the number of exhibitions excluding permanent exhibitions from the chart in top right side: “Number of Exhibitions”.

*The number of exhibitions in 2022/23 refers to the exhibitions held during the financial year from 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023.